Twenny and Peanut had endured two nights in hell. And perhaps Fournier, too, assuming he was still alive. On the other side of the coin, they could all be dead. Staying was a big risk, but now we had additional weapons and ammo, I felt a little more confident about getting some answers. ‘Yeah, we do,’ I said finally.
West handed me the sniper rifle. ‘This one’s headed for recycling,’ he said.
‘What happened?’
He broke it down quickly and handed me the barrel.
‘It’s bent. Hit a rock on the way down.’
I held it up to catch the meager moonlight and sighted down the rifing. Sure enough, there was the slightest of bends, which turned it into scrap metal.
I handed the barrel back and he swung it underarm toward the lake and waited till I heard the splash.
‘Vin,’ Ryder called out in a hoarse whisper. ‘Jesus, sir — guys… come here.’
I managed to haul myself up to the standing position, every muscle in my body threatening to desert. I could dimly make out Ryder’s outline. He was motioning us over with some urgency.
‘Look,’ he said, when I got close enough, pointing at something on the ground. It was Leila. Ayesha was kneeling beside her and holding her hand, which was shaking. And then something lying across one of her legs shifted, a completely unnatural movement. I thought perhaps it was a fold of the poncho. It moved again. Shit, this was hardcore. My mind had trouble coming to grips with the picture sent from my eyes. A big motherfucker of a snake had eaten Leila’s boot with her foot still inside it, and had thrown its coils up around her calf and thigh and was trying to squeeze the living shit out of it. One of the coils slid inside another, tightening, causing Leila to gasp.
‘What up, yo?’ asked Boink with a groan, waking, rolling onto his back beside Leila and slapping at something on his arm.
LeDuc was still asleep.
‘What are we gonna do?’ Ryder asked.
‘Get it off me,’ Leila shouted suddenly, providing a suggestion. ‘Get it off!’
LeDuc woke with a start.
Of all people, why Leila? Why couldn’t this have happened to — well, yeah, Ryder, for example?
‘An African Rock Python,’ said West, crouching beside me as I examined it, not overly concerned. ‘I remember these guys from jungle training school. Adults grow to thirty feet. This one’s a teenager, probably only around ten feet.’
‘Only,’ I said.
‘Just get it fucking off!’ said Leila, hysterical.
‘This is going to make a nice handbag,’ he told her as he pulled his Ka-bar and chopped the blade down on the snake’s spine just behind its head with precisely enough force to sever it. The coils loosened immediately. The sergeant ran his knife blade around the snake’s head in one fluid motion, then, using both hands, pulled its thick body back, and the star’s boot was disgorged from the reptile’s gullet with a sucking sound. Next, the sergeant slit its mouth at the hinges of its jaw and peeled the head away from her calf, her skin and muscle shielded from the needle-sharp teeth by the leather of her high-cut boot. West passed the bloody head to me. It was heavy, meaty, and bigger than my hand.
‘Might need some help here,’ he told me.
I tossed the head over my shoulder into the elephant grass as West uncoiled its body from around Leila’s leg, and heaved the coils into my arms. The thing weighed a ton and its skin was dry and gave off a musky, gamey smell.
When the last coil was pulled free of her leg, Leila scrambled backward on her hands and feet into the unflattened elephant grass. Something big slithered in the grass behind her, which caused her to cry out and clamber forward onto one of the ponchos. She stopped there on her hands and knees, breathing heavily, and whispered, ‘Holy Mother of God…’
‘You’re okay, honey,’ said Ayesha, kneeling in front of her and cradling her face between her hands. ‘Everything’s all right.’
‘Can you feel your leg, ma’am?’ West asked.
‘It… it was numb,’ Leila said. ‘N… now I got pins and needles.’
‘Good. No permanent damage.’ West turned to me and said, ‘Let’s straighten this sucker out.’
The python turned out to be around thirteen feet in length.
‘She’s lucky we caught this thing when we did, before it got her all coiled up with its full length,’ West said as he slit its underside. ‘Gotta do this fast to stop the meat going off. There’ll be worms and bacteria in its gut,’ he explained as he cut. ‘So, you know what snake tastes like?’
‘Like ham and cheese, I heard,’ I said.
‘Since when?’ Cassidy asked.
‘Don’t spoil it for me.’
After he’d pulled out the viscera, West skinned the reptile before trimming a dozen large steaks off its flanks and throwing the remains of the carcass in the lake.
‘We can’t eat this raw,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to make us a fire.’
‘Risky,’ I said. A fire would telegraph our whereabouts to anyone within a quarter-mile radius.
‘Not here.’ West reassured me. ‘Later.’
‘How we gonna do that? Rub sticks together?’ asked Boink, who’d been standing behind West and observing him as he worked.
‘The easy way.’ West pulled a disposable cigarette lighter out of his pocket, cupped it, rolled his thumb over the wheel and sparked up a small flame. ‘Found this in one of the African’s packs. We’re gonna need fire to boil water, fill up the camelbacks.’
‘Cooper!’
It was Rutherford.
‘Look what just washed up.’
I went down to the water’s edge in time to see the Englishman dragging a body up onto the mud. It was Marcel’s. Rutherford flipped the corpse onto its back. The eyelids were half closed. As LeDuc suggested, he might have drowned, though the more likely cause of death was the hole bashed in the top of his skull through which his brains were falling out.
Leila, Ayesha and Boink kept to themselves and said little as we moved away from the lake in the thin pre-dawn light, a surly lethargy in the way they dragged their feet, heads down.
The main source feeding into the lake appeared to be an angry tumble of water hugging the base of the cliff. Keeping to its flank, we picked our way over smooth black and gray granite rocks, the forest occasionally overhanging in places.
We pulled up after half an hour’s walk when a bend in the watercourse took us out of the shadows and into sunlight. Overwatch was delegated to Ryder and Rutherford, who went to find good vantage points. The principals sat on rocks on the edge of the forest and passed around the last of the jerky while West worked on a fire. We were going to be leaning heavily on the sergeant’s survival skills here. Like most everyone, I’d done a jungle course once upon a time, but it was basic and general in nature. Almost all of my combat and survival experience had been gained in higher latitudes. From what I remembered of the files on my team, it was the same for Rutherford. Cassidy was a counter-insurgency expert. And Ryder’s instincts were restricted to surviving concrete jungles.
Having a cigarette lighter was a piece of luck, as there weren’t any dry sticks around, let alone Boy Scouts to rub them together. West overcame the problem of wet fuel by locating a variety of palm that had a high concentration of oil in its pith that caught fire easily and burned with a strong flame. Over this, he placed kindling shaved from the frond stems of another variety of palm. More substantial dry fuel was sourced from inside rotted trees that had recently toppled. Within forty minutes we had a fire going, python steaks grilling, the sun on our backs, and Aye-sha and Leila taking their clothes off to bathe. The day was looking up.
While the steaks cooked, I pulled LeDuc aside and got a few things off my chest. ‘The guy we had a chat with back at the ambush after we came down.’